Kristol is, of course,
citing the opening of Marx’s 18th Brumaire. Let’s quote it in full:

Hegel remarks somewhere that
all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He
forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière
for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the
Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew in place of the Uncle. And the same
caricature occurs in the circumstances surrounding the second edition of the
Eighteenth Brumaire!

We’ve been fighting a
second-edition Civil War for some time now—since the electoral season that led
to Obama’s first term. I've called it antebellism. It’s tiring and tiresome. The primary problematic effect
of mobilization around the Confederate flag in South Carolina has been to
displace concerns to take down white supremacist organizing into the symbolic
field of the Civil War. (Of course, I’m happy it’s not flying, but we’re
talking effects here, not moral norms.) In this regard, Kristol’s citation of
Marx is telling. White supremacists and their mainstream allies have undertaken
a discursive operation that attempts to shunt the possibility of a world-historical
tragedy—a robust, decisive encounter between competing nomoi, a decisive
encounter between the racists and the anti-racists—into something farcical, a
re-enactment of the Civil War undertaken entirely through cultural symbolics.
Kristol wants this farce. It’s far
better than a material challenge to white supremacy, racial capitalism, and the
racial state.

For anti-racists, the
solution is to not get entrapped in this symbolic field—although this is hard.
In the next paragraph of the 18th Brumaire, Marx writes

The tradition of the dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when
they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and
their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet
exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up
the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and
costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable
disguise and borrowed language. Luther put on the mask of the apostle Paul; the
Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the
Roman empire; and the revolution of 1848 knew no better than to parody at some
points 1789 and at others the revolutionary traditions of 1793-5.

Here, Marx encourages us to
think symbolic belatedness as an index of a movement’s political and social
weakness in the time of its unfolding. It looks back because it possesses no
idiom of itself to address the composition of the present—or the future. White
supremacists present their politics indirectly, in the garb of future’s past,
because the future of a white politics is the undoing of any futurity, the
dissolution of the world. A fully whitened world would radiate disaster
triumphant, and so the content needs to hide in ambiguous or illegible
phrasing. A Confederate flag is obviously nostalgia for slavery—but no, it’s
heritage! Hitler can’t be heiled without a numerical transcription of the
alphabet. And most white nationalists, in their public remarks, deploy the
idiom of liberal multiculturalism in order to pose whiteness as just any other
political-racial-cultural identity. Political whiteness knows it can’t be
present in its presence. To be sure, symbolic weakness does not equate to
political inefficacy or an incapacity for outrageous violence; moreover, the
order of the world remains white supremacist regardless of the political
strength of white-supremacist movements. The point here, I think, is that the
cultural-symbolic remains a safe space for white supremacists in public because
it is the point at which politics can be articulated that otherwise can’t be,
and in polysemous, unstable ways that refuse—at least notionally—fixity.
Heritage, not racism.

White supremacy presents
itself through “world-historical necromancy,” in other words, because it can’t
offer a vision of the present or the future that most of the world would want.
This is not to say, of course, that an anti-racist, non-anti-black world is a
vision of the present or the world that most of the world would want, either. I
do want to suggest, though, that we would do well to cede this past in our
quest to build an anti-racist future. Most of the past—especially if white
people, the state, and capitalism are involved—has very little to offer us,
anyhow. So let’s let it go. It’s a field where, at best, to win is to break
even. As Marx put it, as he attempts to call it quits with this necromancy, “The
social revolution…can only create its poetry from the future, not the past.” In
that claim I hear Fanon, whose poetry from the future seems to haunt Marx in the
past: “comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and
endeavor to create a new man [sic].”

Poiesis, not history. We need to dedicate time to writing pieces that will train people in practical anti-racist tactics for the present, pieces that will circulate with the speed and popularity that three dozen articles on the cultural symbolics of the Civil War do. We need to materially organize to develop new ways of thinking in order to create the new human. What if think-piece publishers gave space to this endeavor, instead of shadowboxing with history's poltergeists? When
we make our new world, the Confederate flags will burn, anyhow, and the
monuments of Confederate generals will topple, too.